Cruiser (29 page)

Poseidon and Hades had presided over a devastating rout
of the Regia Marina.
Vittorio Veneto
had escaped, but Iachino had lost three of his heavy cruisers and two destroyers, together with one of his cruiser squadron commanders, Vice-Admiral Carlo Cattaneo, and 2400 men. It was modern Italy's greatest defeat at sea, with a mortal effect on naval morale. Individual Italian ships and men would take the fight to the Allies, at times with great courage, but the fleet itself never again ventured in strength from its harbours. Cunningham had emphatically asserted Britannia's rule of the eastern Mediterranean.

As his weary ships and men returned to Alexandria, they were entitled to celebrate their triumph. But
Perth
did not join them. She and her Hair-Trigger Twin,
Ajax
, were sent off around Cape Matapan to Piraeus, back to the grinding routine of convoy escort.

In his neat printed hand, Jim Nelson wrote a postcard home to his sweetheart, Jean Connor, at the little cottage in Lewisham:

Nelson might have been telling a little white lie about the Stukas. It was the sort of cheerful thing you would write home to your girlfriend, making light of the danger. In fact, the Luftwaffe bombing was becoming more intense as Hitler's invasion of Greece drew nearer. And, worse, the Germans were also attacking at night, which the Italians had rarely ventured to do. That meant even less sleep for men already wracked by tiredness and nervous strain. They got their heads down for a fitful rest when and where they could. All too often, a meal was a cold sandwich and a mug of kye, closed up at action stations. The assault on the mind was unrelenting.

But they had become smarter and more wily, too. Battle tested, they knew their job now. It was a very different ship's company to the bunch of carefree young blokes who had begun their war so light-heartedly in the Caribbean 18 months earlier.

Bowyer-Smyth and his bridge watchkeepers had developed a new trick for dealing with the bombers. It required good judgement but it worked, and it saved them countless times at sea. Even under full rudder,
Perth
had an unusually wide turning circle. It was just the way she was built, but it meant she was sluggish under helm, which made evading an incoming aircraft that much more difficult.

So the Captain used her engines as well. To make a hard turn to starboard, he would order full helm – starboard 35 – and then full speed ahead on her two port engines and slow astern on her two starboard shafts. In layman's terms, the left-hand side of the ship was being forced forward, while the
right-hand side was pulled in reverse. Those competing forces helped her to turn, if not on sixpence then on something reasonably close to it.

The trick was to judge the exact moment. Go too early and the bomber pilot could follow the ship's movements. Too late and he was upon you, directly overhead. It required instant reaction from Ray Parkin, who was usually on the wheel, and from the hands on the engine room telegraphs and below in the engine room itself. The coordination had to be perfect. Without warning, the telegraphs would jangle over an ‘emergency full speed' and the rudder indicator would show hard a-port or starboard. Parkin would wrench the wheel around, greasy with sweat, muscles aching. The stokers below would cut off or throw open the sprayers that delivered vaporised oil to the furnaces. Ears throbbing from the air pressure, unable to hear a thing above the thunder of machinery, they watched the Chief Stoker's hand movements: five fingers up, five sprayers on. Seven down, seven off. Then, urgently, three on to eight on. Other hands kept an eagle eye on the water levels in the boilers, which had to be finely judged: too much water with the steam would endanger the turbines; too little and the boilers could blow. Everything had to be done in split seconds.
Perth
would then lunge onto her new course. It placed enormous strain on the ship, on her machinery and the hull itself. No vessel had ever been designed for such violent handling, and she groaned at the brute forces exerted upon her.

On the last day of March 1941, they were at sea again with
Ajax
, escorting a convoy from Piraeus, plodding along in good order, enjoying another sunlit day in the knowledge that the Italian fleet was not going to bother them. Any danger would come from the air. As they did every evening, they stood to the sunset in their Number 8s – the heavy blue battledress with the anti-flash hoods, and steel helmets for those above decks. The lookouts scanned the skies. They did not have long to wait. Air Raid Red. As darkness drew in, another flight
of Junkers 88s was on to them, weaving through the soaring arcs of tracer and the puffs of dirty black smoke from the exploding 4-inch shells. The bombs came tumbling down but landed harmlessly in the sea. And then there was a lull for a while.

But it was the sort of night they hated. A silvery full moon shed a luminously beautiful glow on the ships and the sea around them – a bomber's moon, they called it. The phosphorescence in their wake was a gleaming silver arrow that pointed to their exact position and direction. It was a gift to the bombers. On this night, not far from Crete, it produced one of their most terrifying moments of all. With no warning, an aircraft was on them, another JU88. It came so low that it almost scraped the foremast as it thundered along the line of the ship from stern to stem. Jim Nelson flinched as he felt, rather than saw, it:

That left nerves jangling. Their radar had not detected the aircraft's approach, and they had not heard it coming, either. Perhaps it had cut its engines and glided down upon them, following their shining wake. There were no bombs because it had been a reconnaissance aircraft, they thought, but it was chilling evidence of their vulnerability. It was like someone
spitting in your face when you were powerless to do anything about it.

Finally, a man broke. Driven beyond endurance, a petty officer named Peter Murdoch, from Croydon in Sydney, could take no more. That night, he left his post in the Transmitting Station, deep below the waterline, and climbed the ladders that led to the Low Power Room, up to the stokers' mess and on towards the upper deck. Halfway there, he ran into Jock Lawrance, in charge of one of the damage control parties.

Lawrance had orders from the Engineer Commander that no one was to go on deck, and he challenged Murdoch, refusing to let him pass. Murdoch returned to the Transmitting Station, but as the ship drove on towards Suda he appeared again several times through the night. Finally, he convinced a suspicious Lawrance that he had an urgent message to take to Bowyer-Smith on the bridge.

It didn't sound right, but, reluctantly, Lawrance stepped aside and waved him through. Later, at the change of the watch, Lawrance turned into his hammock and thought no more about it. But, the next morning, he was shaken awake by the Jaunty, Jan Creber. ‘You're in trouble, mate. The Captain wants to see you straight away,' Creber said.

Still half-asleep, Lawrance struggled into a clean pair of overalls and followed him to the Captain's cabin. The Master-at-Arms, universally recognised to be a good bloke, filled him in as they mounted the ladders and came out on the upper deck. Murdoch had been reported missing. The ship had been searched, but there was no sign of him. They thought he'd gone over the side. Lawrance was probably the last person to have seen him alive.

‘Tenshun! Salute. Caps off. Leading Stoker Lawrance, sir!'

The Captain questioned him calmly and sympathetically – which was a relief, because Lawrance was expecting him to come down like the proverbial ton of bricks. He had feared he might even ‘lose his hook', which meant being busted down a rank. He explained that several times he had stopped
Murdoch. Finally, though, the man had been insistent, claiming he had information for the Captain that was vital for the safety of the convoy they were shepherding. Because Murdoch was a petty officer and Lawrance just a leading rate, Lawrance had finally given way. And that was that. There was nothing to be done. To Bowyer-Smyth and everyone else, it was sadly obvious that Murdoch had thrown himself overboard. Even if by some miracle he was still alive, he would now be many miles astern, and
Perth
could not leave the convoy unguarded to go and search for him.

As the hands stood to the dawn, the buzz went around the ship. Murdoch had been married, with three kids, and his messmates remembered him showing the family photographs around, as they all did. But they recalled, too, that sometimes he would say, in a gloomy way, ‘I'll never see them again.'

Bowyer-Smyth did not report him as a suicide. Murdoch had joined the navy in 1936, signing on as an electrical artificer for the regulation 12 years. His service file was simply marked, ‘Dead. Lost overboard, 31.1.41.' It was better that way, better for the family, especially for his kids.
¹⁷
There was no shame in it, no cowardice. The Germans had killed him. But they destroyed his mind, not his body. In the end, it really made no difference.

The last days of March 1941 heard the drumbeat quicken in Berlin. Hitler and the OKW were absorbed in planning Operation BARBAROSSA – the invasion of Russia. But events in the Balkans and the Mediterranean kept crowding in. Planning was also under way for Operation MARITA – the attack on Greece that would rescue Mussolini from yet another humiliating debacle.

With his usual combination of bribes and threats, Hitler had brought Bulgaria into the Axis orbit, and he believed he had done the same with a pliant government in Yugoslavia. These two countries, both bordering Greece in 1941, would help stage MARITA. But on the night of 26 March, in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, a
coup d'état
led by air-force officers overturned the pro-German regime of the regent, Prince Paul. The next morning, there was dancing in the streets. Belgrade was hung with British flags, and the car of the German Ambassador was spat on by crowds of angry Serbs.

This inexplicable defiance sent the Führer rocketing into one of his more spectacular rages. He summoned his military chiefs to the Berlin Chancellery, read them a furious lecture about Yugoslav perfidy and ordered Goering to send the Luftwaffe to destroy Belgrade. It was especially important, Hitler fumed, ‘that the blow against Yugoslavia must be carried out with merciless harshness and the military destruction be
done in blitzkrieg style'. Führer Directive No. 25, issued that day, began:

The OKW Operations Chief, General Alfred Jodl, worked his staff through the night to update MARITA.
¹
Hitler fired off a long telegram to Mussolini, informing him that help was on the way. In a week, all was ready. On Sunday 6 April, the invasion began. In both Greece and Yugoslavia, it was Palm Sunday, the beginning of the Orthodox Christian Holy Week. At five o'clock that morning, the Luftwaffe dropped its first bombs on Belgrade – the prelude to three days of airborne savagery that would kill some 17,000 civilians. In Athens, half an hour later, the German Ambassador, Prince Erbach-Schönburg, politely presented a note to inform the government of the Hellenes that the Reich had declared war.

Simultaneously, two German armies were on the move. The Second Army, under a field marshal lavishly named Maximilian Maria Joseph Karl Gabriel Lamoral Reichsfreiherr von Weichs zu Glon, would subdue Yugoslavia. The somewhat less baroque Field Marshal Wilhelm List hurled his Twelfth Army, of four armoured divisions and 11 motorised infantry divisions, into Greece on two fronts – one heading for the northern mountains and another striking for the port city of Salonica.

It was a massive exercise in overkill. German intelligence had greatly overestimated the opposition. For all its bravery, the Yugoslav Army was poorly armed and equipped, relying on literally hundreds of thousands of horses, mules and donkeys for its transport. The Greek Army was in little better shape. It had been more than enough to deal with the Italians, but it was no match for the might of the Wehrmacht.
The German wave swept on.

The Australians of the 6th Division, and, alongside them, the New Zealand Division, waited in northern Greece beneath the snowy peak of Mount Olympus for that wave to break upon them. Newly arrived from the North African desert, the soldiers from down under stood on what was known as the Vermion– Olympus Line, shivering in the cold of the Balkan nights.

Perth
was in Piraeus that day, with
Ajax
and the anti-aircraft cruiser HMS
Calcutta
, taking a breather from yet another convoy. The morning began quietly enough. She had berthed near an ammunition ship, the
Clan Fraser
, but Bowyer-Smyth decided this was a little too close for comfort, and he took the cruiser out to anchor in the Salamis Roads. The BBC radio news that morning reported the beginnings of the German invasion, but the starboard watch was given leave for a run ashore.

They seized the chance. Ray Norris and a mate took a camera and went up to Athens to explore the Acropolis. So did Jock Lawrance. Jim Nelson and his mate Jack Cox dropped in to a favourite haunt, the Kit Kat club in Bucharest Street, near the Hotel Grand Bretagne, just a block from Syntagma Square. ‘Mayfair in Athens,' it called itself, ‘the latest and smartest dancing bar in the Balkans.' Lydia and Nadia, the two singers, joined them at their table to share an ouzo. Warwick Bracegirdle and another officer, Lieutenant Terry Power, of Mosman, Sydney, also took a taxi to the Acropolis and then strolled on foot through Athens itself, where, to their amusement, they were saluted by the guard outside the German Embassy. After a few drinks at the George V Hotel in Syntagma Square, they wandered down to the Plaka, the centre of Athens nightlife, and found a pleasant little taverna for dinner. These were civilised interludes they all craved and deserved. They would not last.

As the Australians relaxed ashore, two flights of Luftwaffe bombers lumbered into the air from their base at Gerbini in Sicily and turned eastwards for the 900-kilometre flight to
Piraeus. The first flight, of 20 JU88s, from Fliegerkorps X's III/KG30 group, carried high-explosive 250 kg bombs. The second, of 11 Heinkel He 111s, was armed with mines to block the harbour.

The JU88s were led by Hauptmann Hans Joachim Herrmann, one of the Luftwaffe's most experienced bomber pilots. Known to his friends as Hajo, Captain Herrmann liked to boast that he had been personally recruited to the Luftwaffe by Goering, who had seen him out riding one day in 1935. He had fought with the German Kondor legion in the Spanish Civil War when Hitler tested his newly acquired air force in support of his fellow fascist Francisco Franco. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he flew in Norway and then in bombing raids over Britain, where, legend had it, he became entangled with a barrage balloon over Portsmouth and freed his aircraft only metres above the harbour.

Herrmann was an ardent Nazi and has remained an admirer of Hitler all his long life.
²
His youthful photographs, in Luftwaffe uniform, show a face with the cold glare of the Aryan superman. Later in the war, he would win the much-coveted Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, and, with Goering's patronage, he attempted towards the end to set up Luftwaffe suicide squadrons similar to the Japanese kamikaze units.

On this April evening in 1941, he was 27 years old, piloting his aircraft and his crew of three through stormy weather that forced some of the Heinkels to jettison their loads and turn back. But the
Staffel
of JU88s pressed on. As Herrmann crossed the Greek coastline over the Corinth Canal, he dropped flares to mark the route. The air-raid sirens began to sound in Athens and Piraeus at exactly 8.35 pm.

At the Kit Kat, Jim Nelson and Jack Cox rushed the two girls down to a bomb shelter and then stumbled out into the blackout, pushing their way through panic-stricken crowds in the hope of getting some transport back to Piraeus and the ship. Not to be rushed, Bracegirdle and Power finished their
coffee at the taverna, paid the bill and found a taxi willing to take them to the docks. Roy Norris and his mate had decided to have another look at the Acropolis by moonlight. They had a grandstand view as the raid began:

Ray Parkin had stayed on board. With
Perth
anchored out in the bay, he had more than a grandstand view:

A bomb had hit a British freighter, the
Cyprian Prince
, only a few hundred metres away. With a horrible grinding noise, she broke in half and sank within minutes, the first of many ships to go that night.
Perth
got a boat away and rescued four of her crew from the water. Fires were burning throughout the dockyard, with the searchlights attempting to pierce a pall of low smoke. Even with Bracegirdle and half the crew ashore,
Perth
managed to get her 6-inch main armament and her anti-aircraft guns into action, and the ship shook with the blast.

Circling the inner port, Hajo Herrmann levelled off at 3000 metres, struggling with the joystick and the rudder bar as his JU88 was buffeted by the storm of shells exploding about him. Ahead and below, he saw a freighter of perhaps 8000 tons berthed alongside a dock that was already a mass of tumbled masonry. He called the target to his bomb-aimer. Three bombs fell straight and true, plummeting directly onto the ship. Herrmann rammed the throttles forward and pulled the joystick back to climb out of the seething harbour.

He had hit the
Clan Fraser
, which was loaded with hundreds of tons of ammunition and 250 tons of TNT. Within minutes, she was burning fiercely: red, gold and black, like some obscene tropical flower. More bombs landing nearby set fire to a warehouse and some crates of Hurricane fighters, and the flames from those spread to yet another freighter, the
City of Roubaix
, which was also carrying explosives.

Picking their way through the carnage,
Perth
's liberty men found their way down to the docks, but their ship was nowhere to be seen. In the midst of the chaos, almost deafened by the noise and dazzled by the glare, Jim Nelson and his mate Jack Cox decided they might as well do something useful:

Bracegirdle and Power also made it to the docks, to be told by an Australian sentry that
Perth
would not be sending boats to collect the liberty men that night, for fear they might hit mines dropped in the harbour. The officers were to round up as many of
Perth
's crewmen as they could and billet them for the night on the British cruisers alongside the docks,
Ajax
and
Calcutta.
Not long before midnight, as the raid faded away,
Perth
's liberty men straggled on board
Calcutta
, the Officer of the Watch telling them to get their heads down where they could. Many just stretched out on the upper deck.

But Bracegirdle and Power decided to try to get back to the ship. Right behind the burning
Clan Fraser
, which was now a furnace, they found a small wooden rowboat with a pair of oars. They eased it into the water and began rowing. It was 3.15 am.

They had gone no more than 200 metres when the
Clan Fraser
blew up. The explosion was catastrophic. A roaring fireball shot skywards in an enormous mushroom cloud. Searing pressure waves flattened everything in their path, mowing down
waterfront cranes and buildings as if they were no more than children's blocks. The blast shattered windows in Athens ten kilometres away. Secondary fires broke out, and the air was full of flying metal and debris. A day later, the Greeks would find a huge piece of
Clan Fraser
's bridge structure, weighing some ten tons, in a park two kilometres away. Pulling away in their small boat, Bracegirdle and Power were hurled into the harbour like rag dolls. Bracegirdle later described the event: